Low Heels

If there were any justice, Lloyd Newson would be taken out and flogged as a traitor to his sex, his class and the whole God-given status quo. After all, it’s hard enough these days to find pretexts to prop up male privilege without this openly subversive director-choreographer coming along to reveal every nasty secret of masculine pathology in one engulfing 75-minute extravaganza--everything men try to hide, repress, camouflage, explain away, blame on women or make perversely endearing.

OK, OK, so the seven men of Newson’s London-based DV8 Physical Theatre looked absolutely brilliant in the company’s West Coast debut Thursday in the Freud Playhouse at UCLA. So they danced high-speed, high-risk confrontations in puddles of beer, on broken glass, atop and over walls, on a dangerously tilted platform and even high above the stage on a rope. Does any of that really matter when Newson deluded them into making men--all men--seem inherently, inescapably, certifiably screwed up?

Newson sets his “Enter Achilles” in a London pub and initially focuses his satire on ordinary blokes out for a beer. These sequences seem all about the herd instinct and testing who’s toughest, most dominant and best equipped to keep women in their place. But on the fringes of Ian MacNeil’s mirrored and surprisingly mobile barroom set, images of other kinds of men periodically materialize: sports stars and rock stars and movie stars and models, parading their distinctive styles of macho-male-manliness until the audience hoots derisively.

Darker visions intrude as well: of a sex doll brutally slashed and sodomized in front of a man who prefers that inflatable effigy to the company of a real woman. Visions of men who are most themselves when the violence within them explodes out of control and of others who hide their furious resentments in elaborately faked best-friend, happy-jokester, injured-victim pretenses.

Into this Darwinian, beer-soaked combat zone slinks John Paul Zaccarini, a stupendously ambiguous softie who breaks all the rules. He wears pastels. He drinks from glasses with stems. And he dances--right in front of the “No Dancing Allowed” sign, he dances--freely, impulsively, not bothering to square his shoulders or lock his hips. Of course, the others turn on him with murderous intent, but he suddenly becomes a facsimile of Superman, with strong overtones of Wonderwoman (his turns-in-place during the transformation) and Zorro (the shaving-cream “Z” sprayed on the guy who tries to take away his soccer ball).

Now the local P.C. pundits who wasted the spring debating whether or not Adam Cooper was really supposed to be a swan are going to waste the fall debating whether or not Zaccarini is really supposed to be gay. It’s far more important, however, to see him as the unstoppable creative force in “Enter Achilles,” a perversely unpredictable symbol of the only hope the barflies will ever have of transcending their repressive conditioning and destructive behavior. Whenever he appears, he inspires new possibilities among the men, whether it’s lyrical free-flight from a trapeze (an amazing duet with Liam Steel) or an uproariously playful mass assault on hetero norms set to the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.”

Naturally, the empire strikes back each time, and a final attack by the peerlessly brutal Robert Tannion leaves Zaccarini bruised and degraded. But even this last vendetta doesn’t restore the traditional working-class man’s world that existed before. The center does not hold and the last thing we see is the deserted, doomed Ross Hounslow hanging from the top of a high, upended fragment of the old reality: the barroom floor turned into a precipice.

Besides the dee-vee-ates already named, the cast includes Gabriel Castillo, Paul Clayden and David McCormick, with ominous music by Adrian Johnston punctuating an assortment of pop records obviously chosen for maximum irony. Flashes of full nudity and outbursts of raunchy language make “Enter Achilles” an adults-only event, which is regrettable: If any dance drama could scare an adolescent manchild away from a life of empty, domineering machismo, this is it. Compared to Newson’s pitiless vision of what makes men tick, Pina Bausch seems virtually a Phallocentric groupie, and the most extreme American dance-feminists appear too obsessed with victims to even glimpse the full malignant threat of the victimizers.

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* “Enter Achilles” continues today at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus in Westwood. $9-$25. (310) 825-2101. For mature audiences.